…this time as a full-time embedded photographer and reporter.
Details, and dispatches from Walter, at Michael Yon’s website.
Yon’s paypal bleg’s been changed to read “Support Michael and Walter.”
Let’s pitch in, folks. The man’s a hero embarking on a new career, and his photos and reporting look pretty good. We need more of this type of frontline reporting anyway; that it’s Mr. Gaya doing it is icing on the cake!
 No, not the Nobel Prize-winning economist. Salma!
Yesterday’s mention of From Dusk Till Dawn was all it took 
 for Judge Juggs to become fixated on the lovely Latina. 
I like the Centennial design so much, I started picking up old, beat-up versions of the real thing. All of the below are in .38 Short & Weak (.38 S&W). They averaged about $50 each, but only two of them are in a condition I would consider safe to fire — and even then their cylinder stops are pretty worn. Hopefully when I get time (ha!)Â it won’t be too much of a problem to swap out the cylinder stops from the other two guns. Yet another project for retirement, I suppose.
Â
Note the nineteenth-century grip safety on the leftmost pair.Â
The neat thing about these guns is that they’re so SMALL — significantly smaller than a J-frame. S&W called them “I-frames,” and they’re truly pocket pistols. Even the long-barreled versions could ride relatively unnoticed all day in an inside jacket pocket. I wish S&W would bring one of these models back into production, maybe firing a .380 with moon clips? I know, the market just ain’t there.
For those who are interested, here’s the gunsmith who wrote the book on these guns: David Chicoine. He’s very friendly and responsive to email. Seems to know what he’s doing.
We only had one bad experience in London, at the Grand Indian 2 in Villiers Street. Here’s a Google map. Right about where the arrow points is an Indian restaurant that should be avoided at all costs. Here’s a street view (click to embiggen, as always):
My daughter and her boyfriend met up with us in London after dark. Being traveling students, they were of course starving. So off we went to find them a place to eat.
Earlier my wife and I had found some interesting restaurants on the back side of Charing Cross Station, so we wandered that way again. We weren’t looking for anything fancy; a simple pub or even a fast-food place would have sufficed.
If you enter Charing Cross from the front, and angle towards the back left corner of the building, just past the ridiculous chain-style tourist dive that styles itself an “Authentic English Pub!” in blaring neon, you’ll reach a flight of stairs that descends about twenty-five feet to Villiers Street.
Daughter and boyfriend are going through an extended hippie stage, so of course they rejected English pub fare in favor of more spiritually fulfilling Asian cuisine. But hey, if you’re going to eat Indian food, London’s the best place for it outside of the subcontinent itself.
Into this restaurant we went. It had a cozy atmosphere, with one wall lined with mirrors to make it feel less claustrophobic. The layout was interesting: the kitchen appeared to be well below street level, with food arriving via dumbwaiter. There was one other family there, chowing down on what looked like an excellent meal. We seated ourselves, and daughter and boyfriend made their selections from the menu. Wife and I just ordered drinks.
At this point, the proprietor got angry. You order a meal too, he insisted. We explained that the wife & I had already dined, and that we weren’t going to be eating off the kids’ plates. There was no English barrier; the guy understood perfectly what we were saying. Didn’t matter. He was willing to risk a sale to get as much money out of these tourists as possible.
Now I’m familiar with “minimum order” requirements at certain types of restaurants — it’s actually fairly common in San Francisco Chinese places. But it’s always clearly spelled out in signage, on the menus, etc. There was nothing like that in this restaurant. This guy was just determined to take advantage of the late hour and our hunger to force us to buy more food than we wanted.
Well, we weren’t having any of that. So we left and ate somewhere else. It was only the second time in my life I’ve walked out of a restaurant after ordering.
From the review linked above, looks as though at least one other patron had a bad experience. If you’re ever in London, don’t patronize that restaurant. That’ll show ’em how Americans deal with assholes!
What a jerk.
Â
From his Early Autumn, a Spenser novel:
Paul shifted his grip a little on the shovel and took another stab at the dirt. He got most of it this time. “Don’t they have machines to do this?”
“Yes.” I swung the mattock again. It bit into the soil pleasingly. We were getting down a layer, where the roots and rocks weren’t a problem. “But there’s no satisfaction in it. Get a gasoline post-hole digger and rattle away at this like a guy making radiators. Gas, fumes, noise. No sense that you’re doing it.”
“I should think it would be easier.”
“Maybe you’re right,” I said…. “We’ll use some power tools later on. Circular saws, that sort of stuff. But I wanted to start with our backs.”
Paul looked at me as if I were strange and made a silent gesture with his mouth.
“It’s not crazy,” I said. “We’re not doing this just to get it done…. We do it to get the pleasure of making something. Otherwise we could hire someone. That would be the easiest way of all.”
“But this is cheaper,” Paul said.
“Yeah, we save money. But that’s just a point that keeps it from being a hobby, like making ships in a bottle. Only when love and need are one, you know?”
“What’s that mean?” he said.
“It’s a poem, I’ll let you read it after supper.”
I read Early Autumn at a pivotal time in my life. It’s a short novel with more than its share of moral teachings.
Phil’s been asking about books that shaped our political values. For me, it comes down to a moral core. Bernard Bailyn (more about him later) helped to orient my political compass: if the Founders actually believed what they said in their political pamphlets, then damn it, I can too! But Heinlein and Robert Parker helped to solidify my moral core, so those political beliefs became grounded on more than just statements of faith — they rest on a rational structure springing from core moral precepts.
“The unexamined life is not worth living.” I’ve found it’s a hell of a lot more fun to go through life knowing who you are and what it means to be you.
IIRC, it was this month fourteen years ago when I bought my very first gun. I’ve mentioned before my motivations for why I chose a double-action revolver as my first gun.
It’s all the fault of Ross Seyfried’s article “Mastering Double-Action Revolvers,” in the first gun magazine I ever read, the March 1992 issue of G&A.
On the other hand, my motivation for buying the particular make and model that I did was almost entirely due to an ad on the back cover of that same magazine.
I saw this photo 
and was smitten.
I still think that with the wood grips, the Centennial is one of the most elegant-looking of modern revolver designs. (Pachmayrs don’t do it any favors, but hey! they do the job better.) Someday I’m going to have that back cover blown up into a poster for the den.
Anyway, here’s my now-teenaged baby, with a pair of moon clips full of Glaser Blues, and a Sharpie for size comparison.
My daughter and her boyfriend met up with us during our recent belated honeymoon to London and Paris. Boyfriend is about as close to a real-life Tarzan (or, more accurately, Ishi) as I’ve ever encountered. As such, he doesn’t care much about guns, but he’s a knife aficionado of the highest water — so much so that when we were trying to figure out what monuments to go sightsee, he was looking for knife shops. (Opinels are a lot cheaper over there than here, BTW.)
Anyway, on one of our last days in Paris, he dragged me to a particular shop with a bit of a history. I’ll post more about that place a bit later, but for now I’ll show you what I bought there. Yes, it’s a French knife. So sue me; I like it!
From a comment to this post on Michael Bane’s Blog this past Friday:
No matter who you are or what you’ve done with a big bore handgun, you do it better because that man lived.
–B.C. Walsh
USMC-22nd MEU (SOC), HPD SWAT, Lafayette Gun Club Combat Pistol Team
Mr. Walsh speaks, of course, of Jeff Cooper, who apparently as of Friday was gravely ill following a heart attack.
And yes, it’s some more from To Sail Beyond the Sunset:
In April 1898 to us benighted country people certain simple facts were true. Our battleship Maine had been destroyed, with great loss of life. Spain had declared war on us. The president had asked for volunteers. …Monday, the twenty-fifth of April, came the president’s call asking the state militias to furnish 125,000 volunteers to augment our almost-nonexistent army.
…
All during the twentieth century I’ve run into people who either have never heard of the War of 1898, or belittle it. “Oh, you mean that one. That wasn’t a real war, just a skirmish. What happened? Did he stub his toe, running back down San Juan Hill?”
(I should have killed them! I did throw an extra dry martini into the eyes of one man who talked that way.)
Casualties are just as heavy in one war as in another… because death comes just one to the customer.
And besides– in the summer of 1898 we did not know that the war would be over quickly. The United States was not a superpower; the United States was not a world power of any sort…whereas Spain was still a great empire. For all we knew our men might be gone for years…or not come back. The bloody tragedy of 1861-1865 was all we had to go by, and that had started just like this one, with the president calling for a few militiamen.
(Emphasis added.)
My history books, from high school all through UC Berkeley, went into great detail about the “secret background” of the Spanish-American War: Hearst, imperialism, and so on. And that was about it. Thus it was a shock to me, two years out of college, when I read the above words for the first time. I suddenly understood that it was possible for deeply detailed learning to in fact be quite shallow. None of my schooling had prepared me to be able to explain to anyone why the American people volunteered in such numbers in 1898, except to spout the leftist party line “they were fooled by the propaganda.” Which is, of course, utter bullshit.
It’s also, I realized, what people say when they can’t comprehend ever volunteering for combat themselves.
In Colonial times, a mug of this was so valued that it cost three times a night’s lodging in a tavern. (Or maybe the lodging price was super-cheap, to bring in customers to buy the drinks?)
…Put the Ale on the Fire to warm, and beat up three or four Eggs with four ounces of moist Sugar, a teaspoonful of grated Nutmeg or Ginger, and a Quartern [a quarter of a gill or the equivalent of a “dash”] of good old Rum or Brandy. When the Ale is near to boil, put it into one pitcher, and the Rum and Eggs, etc., into another: turn it from one Pitcher to another till it is smooth as cream. To heat plunge in the red hot Logger-head or Poker. This quantity is styled One Yard of Flannel.
–from Stage-Coach and Tavern Days, by Alice Morse Earle, 1924
It is a certainty that every one of the Founders knew (and some no doubt loved) this beverage. George Washington’s expense account is filled with entries for it. It even had its own special glass:
Here’s a simpler recipe for a variation of the same thing:
A great pewter mug or earthen pitcher filled two-thirds full of strong beer; sweetened with sugar, molasses, or dried pumpkin, according to individual taste or capabilities; and flavored with `a dash’ -about a gill- of New England rum. Into this mixture a red hot loggerhead, made of iron and heated in the fire, was thrust.
